No big-name influx from City planned as Heart looks to rebuild

Michael Lynch, Manchester

Melbourne Heart boss John van’t Schip and the A-League club’s football manager, John Didulica, will be arriving at the City of Manchester Stadium within weeks to run the rule over a host of potential additions to the club’s playing list.

With Australian superstar Harry Kewell having retired and question marks over whether another high-profile marquee man in Dutch midfielder Orlando Engelaar will remain for another season, Heart has plenty of room for some quality additions to the roster.

What next for Heart? With Harry Kewell’s retirement and doubts over Orlando Engelaar, Heart has room for quality additions. Photo: Getty Images

But don’t expect any well known names or fringe players from new Heart owner Manchester City’s first team squad.

Brian Marwood, the man overseeing City’s Australian acquisition, says Heart could see anything between three and five new players added to the squad list this season, but they might not necessarily be current City players.

Aaron Mooy, the Western Sydney Wanderers midfielder, will be one of those new faces, but Marwood says Heart is more likely to see younger players join on loan than established figures, and City does not view Heart as a superannuation policy for fading stars looking for one last pay day in a comfortable environment.

"Both John van’t Schip and John Didulica are coming here when the A-League season ends to understand how we work, the philosophy and culture of the club and during that time there will be a number of conversations happening about next season in terms of further squad strengthening," Marwood says.

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"When we start the season next year, we need to be hitting the ground running. We have to have greater ambitions than where we currently sit. It's not fine to be second bottom.

"We have done a lot of work behind the scenes with our scouting and recruiting department identifying a long list of players that we believe could be suitable for Melbourne. What we have to do is shorten that to a list that fits the profile of what we believe John wants for the team, within the limits of the salary cap.

"We want to get the right type of players. We went through that here in Manchester [albeit at a vastly different level], when the evolution of the team was quite rapid. We feel that it's important to get players who are not only talented but have a connection with the club, the fans and where the club wants to go.

"We need people who want to buy in to the vision of what we are creating. It's not just on-field, it's off-field as well.

"This is a club we have to grow. It's a small fan base in a city of 4.2 million people so there’s huge potential, that’s going to require everyone to come together to play their part in growing the club."

Marwood, an English league championship winner with Arsenal in the 1989-90 season, a former chairman of the English PFA and one-time marketing executive with Nike, has been at City for five years and has seen the club’s growth from also-ran to powerhouse of the English game through the cash injections of the UAE owner Sheikh Mansour.

"The type of players we would realistically look at [for Heart] from here are young players on loan … we have to look at that because most of our players are either in our first team at 20 or out of the club.

''You are probably also then looking at players who are coming to the end of their career, and we don’t have too many of those.

"We need and want to develop the image of Australian football. Right now for a player to travel from England to Australia, it's a) a long way away, and b) they are not sure of the standards. We need to heighten the awareness of the levels of Australian football, the growth of the game in the country and the type of players who are playing in the A-League right now. It's something we have to play our part in, in developing the profile.

"We have to change the perception of people’s thinking. And equally we don’t want [players going to Australia] to be thinking ‘I’m going there because it's the end of my career and I just want to bolt on a couple of years and earn some reasonable money.’ That’s not what we want.

"I am talking about changing attitudes and people’s thinking. There’s a big job there for us, and the league."

It has been reported in Australia that Heart’s players would go to Manchester to have some part of the pre-season, but Marwood was non-committal, saying that no decisions on issues like that would be made until the season was over.

He confirmed that City would not be touring in Australia this year, although he admitted that the club would have loved to have travelled to Melbourne as a major marketing initiative to herald its first full season as Heart’s majority shareholder. The World Cup, he says with a rueful grin, got in the way.

"We just felt if we were going to come down we were going to do it in the right way and that we needed to present ourselves in the right way.

"It was just felt that was probably not going to be viable in the summer. It would have been a great statement to make. We would still have had a great team going there, but we wouldn’t have had the likes of Aguero, Yaya Toure, David Silva and several others, and these are the sort of players people want to watch and see at close quarters."

He remained non-committal about the mooted change to Heart's name and colours. While most in Australia assume it is inevitable that the club will call itself Melbourne City and change its strip to sky blue, in line with City's and its soon-to-be-established MLS team New York City, Marwood merely says that no final decisions have been made.